Some 10 years ago, Microsoft tried to introduce a personal assistant for his Office suite, Clippy, in order to help their users discover new features. Even if there seem to be people that like it (MS says 50 %), it was an overall failure.
How would you frame the problem, and which suggestions do you have to improve its user experience? Which lessons can be learnt for similar assistants?
Answer
Siri seems to be the spiritual but not functional successor to Clippy. A major difference is that people request Siri's help whereas Clippy imposed help upon you.
Another interesting thing is that Clippy is an Embodied Agent. For decades people have thought "How cool would it be if using your computer was like talking to a person". From that thought they focused on making Embodied Agents, basically visual Avatars for the computer. Hard Research shows people don't particularly like these things nor do they help, generally speaking. Lots of research has tried to improve these agents, but I still believe the idea is largely impractical. Note that Siri has no "face".
Clippy was also very limited technically; Siri allows natural language and allows the user to tell Siri the problem so it can come up with a solution, Clippy simply inferred what you were doing and tried to guide you along; this is also an Adaptive Interface; something else that sounds like a neat idea--change the UI to what the user probably wants; what could be better? In reality these simply cause frustration.
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